stargeek
HOW NATURE WORKS AND WHY CIVILIZATION DOESN'T: A SYSTEMS VIEW OF GAIAHOW NATURE
|
| I'm working on an update of the
long paper
that describes my 'journey' to environmental awareness and activism.
Rather than starting the revision at the beginning, I thought I'd
start
with what was most important -- the final section with the 'root cause
analysis' and the 'solution map' that ultimately became my How to Save the World Roadmap.
When I first published this paper on my blog, the charts that accompanied it generated more buzz than the paper itself. You can find them here and here. Since then, I've come to realize that these variables are less cause-and-effect than components of a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system. In Systems Thinking terminology, the 'virtuous circle' of life that existed in nature until about 30,000 years ago was 'disrupted' by events that upset the equilibrium and rippled through the system, producing a new self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system that we call 'civilization'. Based on the research I've since done on population, violence, and on our political, economic and social systems, I've now updated the charts to show the circular nature and greater interrelationship of the 19 elements. The first chart shows how nature works as a self-managed, self-balancing planetary organism -- a map perhaps of what is called the Gaia Theory:  Chart 1 And the second chart shows the equivalent man-made systems that have come into play with the dawn of civilization 30,000 years ago. This replacement system, alas, is not self-balancing -- it is utterly unsustainable, though our awareness of that fact is only a century old:  Chart 2 How did this unfortunate transformation occur? We don't know for sure, but the most compelling theory I have seen is that, as a consequence of the last ice age, and/or the invention of efficient hunting tools (like the spear, and the bow and arrow), there was a sudden and massive shortage of the big, lumbering game that man had hunted so easily since his emergence on the planet. So the element to the right of the red box changed from "Abundant Resources and Energy" (chart 1) to "Scarcity of Resources and Energy" (chart 2). Usually when this happens (except when it is a result of a major extinction event like that caused by the meteorite impact 65 million years ago that wiped out most of life on Earth), nature is able to fix the imbalance. It does so by causing the species suffering the shortage to reduce its fertility rate, temporarily increasing its mortality rate (more of them are eaten by predators, and epidemics arise to reduce over-crowding), and the result is a reduction in their consumption of the scarce resources (food, land etc.), until the scarce resources have had time to replenish themselves (illustrated in chart 3, below, which is based on the work of Darwin, Lovelock, and Edward T. Hall). In this sense, our planetary organism Earth behaves analogously to a human organism -- when there's a shortage of food, it goes into hibernation, lowers metabolism, and draws on internal reserves (fat) to compensate until a new external food supply is found.  Chart 3 But the situation 30,000 years ago was different. Man had developed enough intellect to institute some man-made solutions to scarcity instead of relying on the ones nature had always used. These human inventions included agriculture, animal domestication, and then, to make those work, a whole series of social, political and economic systems. We created man-made 'stores' of resources to offset the natural shortages, and tools to protect ourselves and our food supplies from, and even eradicate, natural predators and diseases. Our intellect tipped the balance of power, at least temporarily, from nature to man. Once that 'tipping point' had been reached, the rest of the 19 elements on Chart 1 were transformed into the corresponding elements on Chart 2. By enormous strength of ingenuity and will, we have entrenched this New World Order for 30,000 years, and exported it to every corner of the globe. The problem is that it's unsustainable, and the kind of tinkering with it espoused by optimists and those that deny we are in crisis, just won't fix it -- both nature and civilization are immensely complex systems, and civilization is also immensely fragile. We need to simultaneously work on many of these 19 elements to create a new 'tipping point' to restore the natural system that worked for millions of years before civilization. That doesn't mean going back to a pre-civilization lifestyle -- that would be foolish and impossible. It means moving forward on many fronts -- political, social, economic, ecological, technological and in the way we make a living. Let's take a look at some of the weakest points in Chart 2 to see how we might, with coordinated or ingenious small-group effort, flip some of them over to their corresponding Chart 1 states:
Many of my readers have told me "that's fine, but I'm not rich, powerful, expert, entrepreneurial or innovative, so what can I do now to help, to make a difference?" That's a fair question, and I'm developing the answer to it as the final section of the revised paper (and also as a more practical replacement for the Roadmap). I should have it finished next week, and I'll publish it here first. |
| Second part of a three-part essay. Part One is here. Bibliography of
all sources cited is here. To appreciate the truth about nature you need to look at it from outside the frame, the filter through you've been taught to look at everything. In other words, you need to unlearn, or at least forget, what you've learned, been told, and come to understand about nature and about the entire world in which we live. We need to give you a kind of cultural amnesia for awhile. If you're willing, let's see if we can do that. Most people have a picture of humans at the top of a long, complex evolutionary tree, an inevitability, a pinnacle, a culmination. In fact the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House, teaches us that homo sapiens is in evolutionary terms a small, recent and ordinary evolution, a small part of a small and undistinguished (if you study variations in our DNA) branch of the tree of life. He also teaches us that evolution is not about 'up' at all, but rather a constant series of experiments, variations, random walks from what has succeeded, as nature's method of ensuring the resiliency of life on Earth by checking to see if this minor variation might be a bit hardier in this ecosystem, that minor variation in that ecosystem etc. Most of these variations fail, but quite a few succeed, so to the outside observer all life on Earth, and perhaps on every planet, appears to be a single living organism that takes root, flowers, grows to occupy as much space as the climate will permit, and then continues to change in a balance, an equilibrium, responding to climate change and introducing new random variations in an eternal quest to find forms that are best suited to survive in the little place in space where it happened to land. Gould's lessons are:
In fact prehistoric man's life was not, as we have been led to believe, "short, nasty and brutish", but idyllic and leisurely, for three million years, argue revisionist economist-historians Peter Jay, in his book The Wealth of Man, and Marshall Sahlins, in his book Original Affluence. Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a meteorite plunged the planet into darkness and exterminated the dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of life in dynamic equilibrium. That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded. Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per week. As these species became extinct (aided perhaps by the Ice Ages and by the increasing sophistication of our hunting tools), we turned to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and epidemic disease. In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming, exhaustion of arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation, shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. Jay is a pessimist about the competitiveness that our civilization has inspired, believing that we are unlikely to ever put the collective interest of all life on Earth ahead of our individual interests in the face of ever-exploding population and growing scarcity. So we live now on a world where two systems coexist uncomfortably with each other: The 600 million year old natural system of biodiversity, experimental evolution, and continuous re-balancing, punctuated by Extinction Events, and the 30 thousand year old man-made system of continuous growth, expansion, internal competition, and innovative technologies. We'll look at the man-made system later. For now, let's go back and try to understand the natural system. Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness. Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread and fear. You think you might because in the 'real' world you have been conditioned to fear nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive. You have been taught, brainwashed, to distrust and ignore your instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgements. You would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then, probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command your attention, you would probably play with your new 'friends', exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all species in nature do. Imagine, too, that there is an unseen force that, for a while, protects you -- pulls you away before you can touch plants that are poisonous, guides you to safe, comfortable places to sleep, eat, drink and play, and repels predators, until you have learned from this force -- let's say you call it ma -- how to survive without its intervention, at which point ma leaves you to your own devices. Your group becomes, in fact, a hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of civilization -- language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being, self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness, awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for nature, and, to the extent needed, creativity -- all the elements of natural systems shown in the diagram above. You will instinctively hunt together and gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert peers. There will be a 'pecking order' of sorts, based on consensus of, and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable -- keen senses, physical strength, creativity -- but the tribe will be egalitarian. There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. Some members of the tribe will be eaten by predators, and others will contract diseases and go off by themselves to die, but these deaths will not cause the members of the tribe to become fearful, paranoid, selfish, greedy or violent. They will simply be accepted as the way life is. Your tribe of amnesiacs will know of no other way to respond. You will respect and flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from them, but you will not fear them. That is how nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but because life is wonderful. When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in a tree in winter, don't feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who lack them) instinctive survival talents -- they need a lot of food in winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they can't, they simply hibernate, and if they even suspect they won't be able to, they'll migrate. They can fly, and I envy them, I wish I were one of them. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze or starve to death -- famine is a modern human invention, due to our huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird, it almost certainly succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries: Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed. The people in your amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous. Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we have lost much of our sensory acuity and openness, largely because we live most of our lives in cities and indoors, areas of great sensory homogeneity, poverty and concealment. We no longer have either rich sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses, opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings in nature, so that even in those rare times when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive, closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge. Our ignorance of nature, combined with our collective arrogance (because of our unquestioned evolutionary success), leads us to believe that we are the only sentient, emotional, intelligent creatures on the planet, and to tell ourselves that all other life couldn't possibly have done so well for so many millions of years because they're smart, sensitive and creative, so it must be because they're automatons just doing what they've been 'programmed' to do. But just as economists and historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man, scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communications has so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary intelligence, great awareness of their own existence, and profound emotion. Jeff Masson's work on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants Weep, supports this theory. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us to be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentally different. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate. Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do so in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidence that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of deep emotion, long-lasting memory and astute reasoning. I have since read other works that ascribe similar intelligence and emotional sensitivity to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's book Mind of the Raven is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). At this point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am incredulous -- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of 'all things natural' is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind acceptance of religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position. I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs, but I can only hope that, with people like Masson and Heinrich systematically debunking the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will at least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what other animals have to teach us, and to say to us. In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it's quite possible that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that they are more 'sensitive' in every sense of the word than we are, that they 'feel' more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then don't they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do -- maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and clumsy human ones that we don't 'hear' them. Or perhaps it's just that they don't have to -- maybe we developed 'sophisticated' abstract language not because we were uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise instructions about man-made processes (like harvesting crops) in our strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How sophisticated a language do you need to say "danger", "food", "yes", "no", and "I love you", and ultimately what else is really important to say? I'm being facetious of course -- humans now need our language and our technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a better way to live, and don't need sophisticated language or technology to do so. Another truth about nature is the importance of community and of place. Civilization has supplanted our sense of community -- the essential unit of social life for all other creatures and cultures on Earth -- with constructs that allow greater command and control over all civilized humans and all human endeavour: The family, the corporation, the religious order and the state. The family is a small, nuclear social unit that is undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and helpless (it can't survive without interacting with larger social groups). The corporation, the religious order and the state are large, hierarchical social units that are undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and omnipotent. By giving the adult (usually the father) the power in the family unit, corporations, religious orders and states are able to lower social resistance to keeping the real power for themselves, which is essential to maintaining order in a world of six billion people who intuitively want to self-govern. The community competes for allegiance and authority with the family on one side, and with the corporation, the religious order, and the state on the other, so it has been systematically attacked and subverted from both sides. When we say we live in a 'community' today, it doesn't mean a group of people with whom we have special kinship (unless we are exceptionally lucky), it means the homogeneous yet unintegrated collection of nuclear family homes that is part of a larger, powerful state. This community has no real power, no real authority, and no real organization, and commands no allegiance from those who live in it, who cannot even really be called 'members'. We are, however, members of a family, and members as well of a state (citizens), religious order and corporation (employees). The place in which we live usually bears no signs of its natural heritage (trees are cut down and non-native trees and flowers planted in their place, and all houses look much like houses everywhere else in the civilized world, and block the view of everything except the neighbouring houses). And many of us live transient lives -- we move often to other, identical-looking places far away, and during the day we commute from our 'homes' on identical-looking highways to identical-looking office buildings and plants. So we have no sense of community, no sense of place, and no loyalty to either. In the natural world, community and place are paramount. The community is democratic, self-managing and self-selecting: Even if you are born into it, either you have to pass a rite of passage to stay (with the approval of other community members) or you are expected to leave and find another community (or form your own). You belong to a community -- a much stronger bond than mere membership. The community (like the amnesiac tribe described earlier) teaches you what you need to live, defines you and gives you purpose. It anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. A house is not a home. And even though most humans live largely inside their own minds, a mind is not a home either, it is not a real place. Very few of us in the civilized world really belong to a community, or have found our true place, a natural home. In nature, by contrast, every creature either belongs to a community and to a place, or is in a lifelong quest for them. It is instinctive to belong to a community and to a place because in Darwinian terms that is what works best. Even we humans, newcomers to the Earth, have three million years of programming in our DNA driving us to seek community and find our place. And because it works so well it is not surprising that most creatures, human and otherwise, who have found where they belong and found their place are quite passionate about it -- they will defend it from all outsiders of their species, even to the death if necessary (which it rarely is, because except for civilized man, most creatures profoundly respect the communities and places of others, and unless welcomed in will go back or move on). And they will share their space with communities of all other species that also call that place home, because they instinctively understand the reverence of place and community, appreciate the value of diversity, and that all life on Earth is sacred. The love that you have for your place and your community, and the other and diverse lives with which you share it, is what gives your life meaning. There is no 'Tragedy of the Commons' in nature, because of the profound understanding that every place is somebody's home, a part of somebody's community, and must be respected. Land is not merely property to be owned or fenced off by one individual of one species. It is sacred, holy, part of life itself. It 'belongs' to no one. We belong to the land, to the web of life of which it, and we, are all a part. Now I know how David Abram must have felt writing The Spell of the Sensuous. It's all too hard, maybe impossible, to explain the truth about nature in words and charts and pretty pictures. It's like trying to describe life outside to someone who has lived their whole life in a prison. A prison with no bars or locks but which, astonishingly, no one walks away from. I can't tell you, but nature can show you her truth. But you need to let her. If you live most of your life indoors, in a car, in a city, inside your own mind, it will be hard, like learning a new language when you're old. To understand you will have to:
OK. So don't listen to me. Listen to the quiet, nagging voice inside you. The voice that resonates with your three million year old DNA, that's telling you that something is very wrong, that life should be better, happier, less of a struggle than this.The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. And waiting to welcome us all home. Part Three, the final part of this series next week, will describe how we, civilized man, lost our way, and forgot who we are, establish the sense of urgency for change, explain why continuing to do what we are doing now, no matter how valiantly, will only get us where we are currently headed, and prescribe not solutions but a process for those who are ready, caring and courageous to design and create a better, natural world. |
 Five years ago, at the age of 48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world, how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they felt the same way that I did. At that time I wrote an essay that described my learning journey to that point. Since then, I have read a great deal more, and engaged a lot of very bright and perceptive people in discussion of these issues. I intended to update the essay, but I have come to realize that the sequential story of discovering the unprecedented crisis this world is in today is essentially what the 'environmental philosophy' category of my weblog tells already. What is needed now instead is a recapitulation, much shorter and not necessarily in the order in which I learned it, of what I have learned and what I believe we need to do to stave off ecological catastrophe. That is what this essay is about. It is my way of 'signing on' to the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries, which stated: "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated." At the root of my environmental philosophy is a growing belief that just having everyone 'do their best' to make the world a better place will not be enough. In other words, we need to bring about a dramatic change in our world in this century, a much greater and faster change than any culture can achieve organically. A change this drastic and this sudden has occurred four times before in human history:
This essay is organized around ten 'arguments'. I am not smart enough to be able to distill the entire logic supporting these arguments into this essay, but I will refer the reader to sources that do. The Bibliograph y at the end of this essay contains the full list of these sources. Some of the books and articles in this Bibliography contradict each other in places. I freely admit to being selective in what I've taken from each. I trust my instincts in that selection. My purpose is not to persuade you, dear reader, but merely to show you what persuaded me. The essay also contains a systems chart of 'How Nature Works' and another of 'Why Civilization Doesn't'. These charts are my attempt to capture the interrelationship of the forces that allowed the world to function as a self-managed system so effectively for millions of years, including the first three million years after the appearance of man, and the forces that have largely replaced these natural forces since the dawn of civilization, driven largely by the changes wrought by the four human revolutions noted above. Here are the ten Arguments: The Truth About Nature: What We Have Forgotten
Week of August 16th: Part Three will conclude the essay by establishing the sense of urgency for change, explaining why continuing to do what we are doing now, no matter how valiantly, will only get us where we are currently headed, and prescribe not solutions but a process for those who are ready, caring and courageous to find and then implement creative solutions. |
| Third and final part of a three-part essay. Part One is here. Part Two is here.
Bibliography of all sources cited is here. In Part Two I explained what we lost when, thirty thousand years ago, in response to a sudden shortage of big game, we gave up our hunter-gatherer cultures, started the tedious and back-breaking work of agriculture, invented civilization and tried to convince everyone that this strange and unintuitive new society was a good and necessary way to live. Although the 'history' we are taught in school starts with the birth of civilization, and treats everything before that as a non-event, books like Daniel's Quinn's Ishmael and Story of B, Richard Manning's Against the Grain, Derrick Jensen's A Truth Older Than Words and the essays of Jared Diamond have started to develop a credible, broader picture of human history, explaining that the transition of three-million-year-old homo sapiens from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler was a traumatic one, and led inadvertently to consequences of great suffering and misery and ecological stresses that today imperil the survival of all life on the planet. This picture looks something like this: We learned that for civilization to work, we had to live closer together, and to work in a coordinated way in new and difficult jobs. To do so we needed to evolve new, abstract, technical languages and create hierarchies of command and control. The crowding, the coercion, and the development of very successful agricultural technologies had three immediate consequences: High levels of physical and emotional stress (nature's way of signalling and dealing with overcrowding), excess food (which in turn led to exploding population, and even more crowding), and, paradoxically, recurring and catastrophic shortages, as the new monoculture crops occasionally and spectacularly failed. Thus the vicious cycle shown in the chart above began. With more and more people crammed into civilization's new 'cities', opportunistic diseases that required proximity quickly evolved and blossomed into epidemics. The human forms of poxviruses, nature's ubiquitous species-specific population regulator, became endemic and killed over a billion of the first few billion humans born into civilization. The crowding and the loss of community and purpose and place led to mental illness, to new physical ailments (like tooth decay and heart disease) connected to the loss of variety in our diet, and to addictions, which are now so common and widespread that we have come to think of them as normal, and only notice them in the descendants of tribal cultures most recently conquered and forced to adapt to civilization's ways, where their symptoms are most tragic and most obvious. The crowding also produced continuous violence and war, as fighting broke out over increasingly scarce land and resources, and the ethic that had held for three million years that land was sacred, and belonged to the community that was already there, was replaced by an ethic of acquisition, of justifiable genocide of uncivilized cultures, and of manifest destiny to conquer and seize every acre of land to meet civilization's insatiable needs. Catastrophic crop failures led to famines, previously unknown on the planet, and the 'fear of not having enough' caused everyone to try to hoard surpluses, and prompted those higher in the new hierarchies to demand more than their share, and to use their power to establish and preserve a staggering new inequality of health and wealth. Social order, which for three million years had been egalitarian and instinctive and built around the tribal community, started to break down as the new larger social structures did not work on the same principles. New social principles therefore had to be developed: New religions taught that suffering was normal and divine will; New laws and punishments and prisons were introduced to enforce obedience to the rules set by those at the top of the hierarchy; New educational and moral codes taught that war is honourable and inevitable, that some people deserve more wealth and security than others, and that conformity and other qualities that keep order and discipline are 'virtues'; The nuclear family unit was conceived to promote patriarchy and hierarchy as the natural human order, and to replace the loss of the tribal community. And all of these new systems portrayed nature as dangerous, brutal, something that had to be conquered and subdued in the interest of man, and portrayed man as divine, above and apart from all other life, so that man was absolved from the guilt, the responsibility and the intuitive distress over destroying nature and enslaving the tribal peoples and animals that got in the way of global dominion by 'civilized' man, in his insatiable need for more land, more resources and more slave labour to feed the ever-increasing masses. And man, social, adaptable, gullible creature that he is, bought it all. He learned to forget his true nature, to distrust his instinct, and to believe that civilization, despite its vicious cycle, was the only way to live. It's only in the last century that the wisdom of this new civilization ethos has been seriously questioned by more than a few eccentric individuals. This century has seen the worst wars, the worst famines, the worst epidemics, the greatest suffering of any century in civilization's brief 300-century history, and the lack of progress has started to lead many to a sense that something is terribly wrong. In The Axemaker's Gift, Burke & Ornstein reveal that human innovativeness, which originally helped man adapt and live better, is now used as a tool to entrench authority and concentrate power. In The Unconscious Civilization John Ralston Saul explains that the political and economic and corporate systems we built to make our lives better have now enslaved us, and are out of our control. In Ockham's Razor, Wade Rowland argues that civilization has dehumanized humans, and that science and technology have accelerated rather than slowed this process in the last millennium. In People Before Profit, Charles Derber recounts the cautionary tale of the 18th century robber barons and warns that corporatism is once again driving much human activity, in ways that benefit only a tiny elite and impoverish all other life on Earth. In When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten shows how corporations, which we invented to try to improve the production and distribution of resources, have lost sight of their purpose and now control us, while producing ever-greater inequality of wealth. The Worldwatch Institute, in its annual State of the World reports, dispassionately identify the measures of growing ecological collapse. And in The New Rulers of the World, Jon Pilger shows how much control now resides in a tiny number of people -- fewer than a million -- with a vested interest in perpetuating the vicious cycle above. Richard Manning's Against the Grain explains how grain surpluses were the first human currency, used to bribe some people into beating down others to establish the first human hierarchies, and describes the incredible vulnerability of monoculture agriculture to catastrophic failures that has led to soul-destroying famines, wars, unimaginable suffering, and even cannibalism -- and ultimately to the political systems that perpetrate these disasters and lead to overpopulation, modern concentration-camp style factory farms, and staggering inequality of power and wealth. As these and other authors paint a disturbing picture of civilization's well-intentioned social, political and economic folly, other writers describe civilization's devastating impact on our psyches. Edward Hall, in The Hidden Dimension, explains the psychological impact of overcrowding as a natural stress reaction common to all animal species. The purpose of this reaction is to induce in creatures that have overpopulated a series of hormonal changes that reduce fertility, increase aggressiveness (to spread them out), and increase susceptibility to disease, and hence quickly bring the population back into ecological balance, as illustrated in the diagram in Part Two. In rare situations when that fails, the hormonal changes kick up another notch, and a social 'blow-up' is produced -- aggressiveness to the point of murder, eating of the young, and adrenal shock leading to premature death ensue. Hall argues that this is precisely what we are witnessing in violent, stressful civilized society. Psychologist Glenn Parton goes further, arguing in The Machine in Our Heads that because we have forgotten how we lived for three million years, lost touch with our instincts, we recognize that something is terribly wrong with the world and feel responsible for it, but no longer see the solution, so the stress ultimately drives us insane. Meanwhile, the vicious cycle continues to spin out of control. The Census Bureau now predicts that there could well be one billion Americans and fourteen billion humans on the planet by the end of this century, but the corporatist-owned major media continue to pander to the modern myths that population is levelling off quickly, that technology and ingenuity will solve all our problems in plenty of time, and that in fact the West needs more babies to support its ageing population. Agencies like NOAA and NASA, and scientists like Bill McKibbon (The Overheating World), David Stipp (Climate Collapse) and Kenny Ausubel (The Empire Strikes Out) provide growing evidence that human overpopulation, overdevelopment and overconsumption are not only wiping out most species of life on the planet, but precipitating potentially catastrophic climate change as well. And the creatures that are left, argues JM Coetzee in Elizabeth Costello, are being subjected to cruelty of holocaust proportions. It is not surprising, in the face of the enormous stresses of civilized life, the incredible unease and guilt we feel about the extinction of all other creatures on the planet, the staggering violence, cruelty and suffering endemic in the culture we created and which is now seemingly out of our control, that we should seek refuge in denial -- denial that Earth is in crisis, denial that the atrocities and suffering are actually occurring, denial that it going to get worse rather than miraculously better thanks to human ingenuity or divine intervention, denial that it is our human responsibility to do anything about it, denial that we can do anything about it, and denial that we have any personal responsibility beyond just doing our best not to contribute to the crisis. And if we're smart enough and informed enough and sensitive enough to be unable to deny this grim reality, we take refuge from the hopelessness and from our helplessness instead by turning it off, by busying ourselves with simpler, more personal, more manageable things. And if we can't do that either we end our own lives. Human kind cannot bear very much reality. So what are we to do? Some of the writers cited above offer no solutions -- they are merely diagnosticians, they say, it is not their place to tell us what to do. Some writers do proffer answers, that range from the modest to the radical to the resigned. Here are some of them: The late Freeman Dyson, in his famous Wired interview, suggests we need to rediscover community and focus our attention on it, since that's the political level at which we can have a personal impact. Along with that, he says, we need to quickly advance new technologies that (like solar energy co-ops) increase community self-sufficiency and (like biotech innovations) improve quality of life. Economist Herman Daly, in Developing Ideas, proposes an economic and tax program that would help communities flourish and encourage conservation and the protection of the commons, and proposes a global contract in which developed nations would agree to reduce their levels of consumption while in return the developing nations would agree to reduce their levels of population. Just in the last year, Jon Schell in The Unconquerable World has proposed a new political system built around non-violence and consensus-building, while Shoshana Zuboff in The Support Economy has proposed a new post-capitalist economic system based on small enterprises collaborating to meet human needs holistically. Thom Hartmann in Unequal Protection, David Korten in When Corporations Rule the World and Joel Bakan in The Corporation present prescriptions for stripping corporations of their power and perhaps returning that power to local communities. Jim Merkel in Radical Simplicity prescribes a way that each of us can strive to reduce our personal footprint to sustainable levels. Thomas King in The Truth About Stories and Thomas Berry in Dream of the Earth both say we need to write a new story about a new human culture, that the rest of us can embrace, and which will show us the way forward. Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point teaches us how change occurs and can be brought about quickly, and Peter Singer in Ten Ways to Make a Difference and the late Dana Meadows in Places to Intervene in a System offer pragmatic advice about how to bring change about. Stuart Koffman in At Home in the Universe explains how we can exploit the attributes of self-managing systems to help humans evolve at the community level. While Margaret Mead tells us that most of the major changes in human society and culture have been wrought by a few, caring people, James Surowiecki in The Wisdom of Crowds persuades us of the importance and value of tapping into the collective wisdom of large numbers of people who, together, probably have the answer to every problem, even one as intractable as the crisis that faces us today. And Bill McDonough in Cradle to Cradle and Avery Lovins in Natural Capitalism show proven ways that could be used to redesign the world by learning from nature. Bucky Fuller reminds us that it is much easier to create a new system that renders the old one obsolete than to try to reform an existing system. There is even a school of thought that proposes a human cultural metamorphosis, explained by Elisabet Sahtouris in EarthDance and Gary Alexander in eGaia, by which transformation to a new human culture might be achieved quickly. Glenn Parton in Humans in the Wilderness suggests a grand experiment of spaced-out Intentional Communities, to reintroduce humans to community and wilderness, and provide a model for building a new natural culture. So there are many suggested solutions, none of which has achieved any great groundswell of support. They are of four main types:
My answer continues to evolve the more I read, and I'm much less convinced that it's the right answer than I am of the Truth about Nature and the Truth about Civilization. But for those that are interested, here is my answer, as of today:
Once the book is done, I'd like to start a think-tank, to make respectable the idea of Saving the World as a full-time job, and help those that are informed enough, and committed enough, and courageous enough, and self-sacrificing enough, to start working together on some bold, revolutionary answers. And I'd like to start a Model Intentional Community, and use it as an opportunity to teach young people about nature and Natural Enterprise and critical thinking and creative thinking and a better way to live. And of course I'll continue to do the 15 things listed in point 1 above, which have so transformed me in the three short years since I began this belated journey to try to understand my purpose and my sense of dread about the world we live in. The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. The truth about civilization is that it was an honest mistake, an invention that was necessary at the time, a mere 30,000 years ago, when nature appeared to be letting us down and we thought we could do better. But now it has outlived its usefulness, and is out of control, and threatens the survival of all life on our planet, so it's time to let it go. It's time to move forward and imagine and invent a new culture, a sustainable one that works for all creatures on Earth, drawing on the best learnings from nature and the best innovations from civilization. It's time to go home. |
 Virginia
reader Myke Myers kindly
brought to my attention the work of his fellow Virginian William
McDonough.
McDonough is an architect and designer who has garnered a lot of press
for his bold yet pragmatic view of design. In a recent interview with
New Scientist he says:Consider this: all the ants on
the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of
humans.
Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years, yet their
productiveness nourishes plants, animals and soil. Human industry has
been in full swing for little more than a century, yet it has brought
about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature
doesn't
have a design problem. People do... McDonough maintains four websites: His firm's, his partnership's, his own, and his intelligent design
site. The sites are as effectively designed as his buildings -- easy
to
browse, productive, engaging, and advancing the cause (the media are
invited to select from ready-to-plagiarize materials that simplify
writing about McDonough or his businesses). He's won awards as a
visionary and environmentalist, and his firm's designs have won awards
for eco-efficiency. And he's written a book, Cradle to Cradle
(itself made of recyclable polypropylene, not paper), with colleague
Michael Braungart, that explains the vision that underlies all his
work. It is, simply: Learn from, and
imitate, nature -- nature knows how to design and build things right,
everything recycled, zero waste.The Earth's natural systems can probably support a few hundred million of our species, but soon there could be 10 billion of us... Eco-efficiency, where you try to reduce everything to zero, is not much fun. And nature itself is not that efficient. It's effective. Take a cherry tree in the spring. It's not efficient - how many blossoms does it need to regenerate? But it is effective: it makes cherries. We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency, but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem. We can celebrate abundance where it is ecologically intelligent. From my designer's perspective, I ask: why can't I design a building like a tree? A building that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, sequesters carbon, distils water, builds soil, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colours with the seasons and self-replicates. This is using nature as a model and a mentor, not an inconvenience. It's a delightful prospect. When I'm working with business people I talk business. We talk about how much money can be made or saved, because that gets their attention. We never try to convert someone who is calcified: we never try to teach mules to play the violin. It sounds terrible and the mules don't like it. This is the kind of thinking we need -- assuming we can somehow solve the fact that there are at least ten times as many people on the planet as it can healthily support, and that our culture, and its political, legal and economic systems are utterly dependent on an unsustainable concentration of wealth, abuse of power, ever-accelerating growth in consumption of resources, and subjugation of human will and dignity. McDonough calls himself an optimist, and thinks we can turn everything around by just redesigning our world. But I think sooner or later in this century, whether we solve the population and culture problems quickly and intelligently, or go crashing into the wall of eco-catastrophe, we are going to need to radically redesign and rebuild our culture, our economy, and our social systems. We can only hope that with guidance from people like William McDonough -- and also listening to nature and our own instincts -- we will design and build the next human culture more responsibly and intelligently than we did the current one. So that those of us lucky enough to live in that brave new world will know only balance, beauty, harmony, abundance and peace. Just as our ancestors lived for three million years before we invented civilization, and just as every other species on our world has always done. Imagine. |
 The
same day I posted my article about William McDonough, reader Brian
Dear
pointed out the work that Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute
has been doing in much the same vein. Lovins, with colleagues Paul
Hawken and L. Hunter Lovins, wrote a (fully downloadable) book
entitled
Natural Capitalism that, like McDonough's Cradle to Cradle,
suggests pragmatic, creative ways for man to stave off environmental
disaster by simply thinking and working better, more organically, with
nature as the model. If McDonough's bottom-line message was Learn from, and imitate, nature -- nature
knows how to design and build things right, everything recycled, zero
waste, Lovins' could be Shift
the economy to recognize the inherent value of people and natural
resources, and you can transform the world. While
McDonough, the architect, is focused on physical design, Lovins, the
economist, is focused on systems design. They are perfect complements,
with similar, optimistic, "let's get on with it" worldviews and
concrete prescriptions for change, a refreshing change from the
relentless pessimism in so many analyses of the world's environmental
problems.You can get an excellent idea of Lovins' prescription by reading the chapter summaries of his book online (I'm going to buy the whole book for my reference and "lending" library). Or, read the HBR summary, A Road Map for Natural Capitalism. Using case studies and small successes achieved already, the authors explain how each industry and each facet of the economy can be transformed by looking at it differently, more holistically, including the natural capital that we currently don't value and waste, and step-by-step changing its operating principles, structure, strategy, practices, rewards and governance, and drawing on biologically inspired design principles. Everything in Lovins' prescription is achievable, sensible, and consistent with looking at the economy and markets as a means of maximizing human well-being instead of wealth. But it is in the final chapters, where he takes on the environmental pessimists (like me) and the unrepentent markets-need-growth traditionalists, that I start to lose conviction that this prescription will do the job. After effectively destroying the myth that our economic markets are free and efficient, he describes ways (e.g. tax shifting, changing our measurements of success, encouraging risk and innovation, improving regulation and information) that we can reinvent markets, much as he proposed in earlier chapters how to reinvent industries. His ebullient description of the economic and cultural transformation of Curitiba, Brasil, by a succession of architect-mayors who have redesigned one of the world's poorest and fast-growing cities into a city that works for people, is truly inspiring (anyone know if it's really that successful?) But ultimately, the economy is designed the way it is to funnel power and wealth to those that have it and plan to keep it. It is not designed for efficiency, equity, fairness, and optimal distribution of resources -- in fact, as the extent of poverty, famine, and destitution in a world where a small minority have unimaginable wealth demonstrates -- political and social structures are designed to keep the status quo, to hoard resources, and to create and sustain inequitable distribution of wealth and power. Lovins suggests that the four groups in our political and economic systems: the blues (free-marketers), reds (socialists), greens (environmentalists), and whites (pragmatists), need to set aside their differences and opposing worldviews and respect the fact that each is partly right, and collaboratively assemble an "operating manual for Planet Earth". If there was a more equitable distribution of the resources, power and knowledge needed to assemble such a manual, and if the population and average footprint of humans on this planet weren't both catastrophically soaring, and if the horrendous consequences of these two realities (consequences like war, famine, global waming, epidemic disease, violence and crime, despair, hopelessness etc.) werren't preoccupying all our time and attention, such a manual might be possible. But ultimately, Lovins' prescription is like asking the crew and passengers of an airplane that has been struck by lightning to collaborate and share knowledge and energies to assess how to bring the plane to a safe landing, while it is plummeting to Earth. It's a nice idea, but I think it's a little late for that. |
 In his book
Extinction: Evolution & The End
of Man,
palaeontologist Michael Boulter reviews past cycles of evolution and
extinction on Earth, and sudden cataclysmic extinctions (caused by
meteorites or massive volcanic eruptions). He predicts with scientific
detachment the probability that the next great extinction has already
begun, and that man is very unlikely to survive it. We are simply not
endowed with the right attributes and physical adaptability. The next
flourishing of life on Earth, says Boulter, will be dominated by
creatures of the air -- the birds and insects. It was by taking to the
air and evolving into birds, after all, that the dinosaurs survived
the
last great extinction. Après
nous les dragons.This winter I've taken up a new hobby, birdwatching, and as with all my new hobbies I start with a flurry of research. The incredible sophistication of the design of birds -- aerodynamically, thermodynamically, and socially -- is endlessly fascinating to me. Birds have a body temperature of about 108°F, although some birds like chickadees are able to lower their body temperature by up to 20°F at night in winter, a process called shallow hibernation that helps reduce body heat loss. Unless injured, birds rarely freeze to death, even in -50°F temperatures. Their feathers have extraordinary thermal qualities, and can be fluffed out to increase these qualities further. Their usually easy and carefree 'work' schedule stretches out to an exceptional four hours per day in very cold weather, as they bulk up on fats and proteins, which they work off at night by shivering, generating enough extra heat energy to sustain their body temperature. There's no indication that this shivering is uncomfortable to them as it is to us (perhaps it's more akin to the way we shiver in the throes of passion). They don't go to particularly great pains to find the warmest possible shelter on cold nights, preferring, like human homeless people, the closest unoccupied place out of the wind over much warmer, more crowded, places further afield. Their evolved body chemistry also allows them to fly at heights with thin oxygen despite their rapid respiration rate -- they have auxiliary air sacs beside their lungs, that also allow diving birds to stay underwater for 15 minutes at a time. And their metabolism allows them to fly thousands of miles, for three days at a time, without stopping or landing, during migrations that can take them from one end of the earth to the other, at speeds up to 100MPH. I especially like watching the chickadees and sparrows, which scientists believe are, in this part of the world anyway, the only species that are somewhat dependent on the welfare of bird lovers for sufficient food during the winter. The chickadees announce my arrival at the bird feeder with a unique and elongated trill, repeated among the group that hang around the massive old evergreens beside our house. At first I thought this was a warning -- human in area message, but they've become so tame in my presence now that I know this message is seed guy's here -- lunch is on. They soar from the evergreens to the sunflower seed feeder with three graceful and elegant dips, making perfect stops on the small plastic rods below the feeder openings, grab a seed and take off, the next one arriving just as it leaves. The sparrows tend to arrive later, and are more sociable, dining at the mixed seed feeder a dozen at a time. Just before sundown they're at their most voracious, bulking up to fend off the coming night's cold. To the shyer juncos, cardinals, finches, nuthatches, creepers and wrens, this seed is less critical fare, and like the occasional jays and crows, chipmunks and squirrels, they're content to eat the seed that's been blown, kicked or dropped from the feeder by the chickadees and sparrows.  The most remarkable thing about birds, of course, is their aerodynamics. Birds have between 1000 (hummingbirds, whose aerodynamics would need a completely separate article) and 25,000 feathers (swans), of at least six different types. These feathers, which evolved fairly rapidly and dramatically from reptilian scales, are almost pure protein, almost weightless, and staggeringly complex and intricate in their construction and variety. The dominant contour feathers themselves come in multiple varieties. They're used for flight, and include the very different wing and tail flight feathers, plus some feathers that biologists think are for protection, body aerodynamic shaping, and colour. The colours of birds, by the way, are a reflection of what the birds eat -- the pigment comes from their food -- and hence a message to migrating birds of what foods are locally available. But the colour of birds is even more complex than that: Part of the colour of birds is due to microstructure of the feathers themselves, and is a result of refraction of light rather than pigment on parts of the body that can't aerodynamically sustain the weight of pigment (most birds' thousands of feathers are so light they would not, all together, register on the most sensitive household scales). The down feathers are for insulation, of course, and of completely different construction from the contour feathers. The other four types of feathers -- semi-plume, filoplume, bristle and powder -- are utterly different again. No one really knows what they're for, though educated guesses include environmental sensing, protection, cleaning, and sound muffling (in the presence of insect prey). The feathers can be manipulated in all directions in an almost unlimited number of sophisticated ways. The elegant pinpoint stops on the feeder rods are made possible by a simultaneous angling of the wings, a manipulation of the wing tips, and a turning down and fluffing out of the tail feathers to increase drag. No human technology has even come close to the precision and intricacy of these manoeuvres. Like our fingernails, the closest human evolutionary cousins of feathers, birds' feathers grow from a root to full growth, and then the cells that permitted the growth, their work done, die. Every feather is replaced by a new one on average every nine months. The musculature of birds is focused in the wings. Fused, incredibly strong bones replace muscles in other places to minimize weight. Birds have three eyelids to protect their vital eyesight, which is up to eight times more acute than ours, much better able to distinguish colours and detect movement. Birds can see with startling, crystal clarity things we see only as a blur. When you study nature in this way, without judgement or condescension, a way that has only been done in our culture for a few generations, it changes your whole worldview. When I was young, growing up in a prairie Canadian city, I was fascinated and terrified by nature. My favourite animals were wolverines -- I learned stories about how they would attack much larger animals. The sheer otherness of nature, its difference from the world 'people' lived in, was the stuff of boys' dreams. I could be Davy Crockett, staring down bears and wearing 'coonskin caps. If I could overcome my aversion to beetles and spiders and snakes, I could learn wilderness 'survival' skills, how to stay alive despite overwhelming hardship, deprivation, scarcity, cruelty. Where do we get this crap? How do we get this strange, warped sense of what the world is like beyond the fragile, flimsy, artificial walls of 'civilization'? Why do we so misunderstand, romanticize, fear -- nature? Today, I'm fortunate enough to live adjacent to wilderness. Half of our four-acre property is pond and swamp and forest and cannot be touched, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Right behind us is a six hundred acre tract of wilderness. I've wandered into the forest and seen magnificent grey wolves no more than 20 feet away. I've seen foxes and coyotes and stags flee at my approach. I've been stared down by a 100-pound, three foot long beaver. Snakes and strange, primeval insects share the patio as I sip my morning tea. Even before I studied the birds, I knew they didn't live their lives in misery, constant terror, near-starvation. My childhood pity for the birds huddled against the cold has long ago given way to a sense of awe and envy. I did some research to try to understand the prevalence of the myths that make us so misunderstand and even, if we were to be honest with ourselves, fear nature. There seem to be three theories, all of which relate to our tendency to fear what we do not know and understand:  The physical theory, espoused by anthropologists and environmentalists, is that we fear nature because we've been physically separated from it for so long that we've become ignorant of its beauty and grace and peacefulness, and prone to believe the sensationalist nonsense of nature being cruel and savage. The moral/psychological theory. espoused by students of religion and philosophy, is that the salvationist, acquisitive culture, the culture that has become ubiquitous on Earth since the invention of agriculture, urbanization and the spread of western religions, teaches us relentlessly that we are morally and spiritually separate from 'the rest of nature', and that our relationship with nature is adversarial and competitive, and as a result we have become psychologically separate from, and hence unable to understand, what nature is really like. The third, scientific/intellectual theory, is that our brain's evolved size, complexity and capacity for abstraction has so expanded our imaginations that, with the lack of direct empirical contact with nature, we imagine nature as huge and ominous and mystical and terrifying and full of danger. As I was putting together the chart of the three theories above, I began to realize that they're interrelated and inseparable and they reinforce each other, and it's the insidious combination of our physical ignorance of nature (for most of us anyway), the relentless psychological indoctrination we receive about nature, and our vivid imagination about things that we don't understand, that together produce the total fiction of nature as dangerous, difficult, tragic and fearsome. The problem is that the underlying causes that have led to these fictions -- overpopulation and environmental stress, our acquisitive/salvationist culture, and the evolution of our brain and imagination -- are themselves connected and self-reinforcing. So the only way we're going to be able to achieve a reconciliation, a re-connection, between man and nature, on any kind of universal scale, is to deal with all three causes at once. I think the way to do that, aside from having to do a lot of education in a very short period of time, is to stop moralizing and rationalizing about nature (in either adversarial and 'noble savage' romantic ways) and start to think about nature in A Third Way. Religion and philosophy are rooted in, and hopelessly tainted by, our cultural anthropocentrism. To try to understand nature from the perspective of anthropocentric morality is as futile as trying to understand the motion of the stars using ancient Earth-centric Aristotelian astronomy. To try to describe nature from the perspective of anthropocentric rationality is like trying to teach someone your language when you have no shared vocabulary or grammar to build on. The Third Way is to understand nature instinctively, intuitively. Trusting your instincts makes things that are inconceivable morally or rationally, as easy for humans to conceive of, and understand, as they are to birds. Scientists have been trying rationally, scientifically, to understand how birds fly, and the staggering complexity of birds' aerodynamic apparatus since Da Vinci, and have hardly made a scratch in that understanding. Meanwhile, instinctively, birds know what they have to do to fly. It is, to them, staggeringly simple, obvious. The instinct is hard wired in them. Moralists and philosophers have been trying to construct codes of conduct and behaviour to explain and modify human behaviour since before the invention of language, and still every century we kill and damage each other in greater degrees and greater numbers, behave in successively more barbaric and less 'civilized' ways. Meanwhile all the other life species on Earth, who have neither capacity nor need for moral codes, conduct themselves in amazingly collaborative and synergistic ways that optimize the quality and quality of life of every creature on the planet -- save perhaps man. The instinct to do so, to know what to do and how to do it, is part of them. They don't have to learn it. There is nothing romantic or mystical about this. It is just listening to the simple, inherent language of evolution. This same instinct is hard wired in us. It was for three million years, long before we developed moral codes and rational skills. We've simply forgotten how to listen to these instincts, how to trust them. But despite the efforts of moralists and scientists to sublimate our instincts for 30,000 years, to replace them with something uniquely human, it's very hard to bury three million years of knowledge coded in our DNA. Just learn enough to set aside the fear-mongering crap the moralists want you to believe, and enough to suspend your stupefying belief in our technology's superiority over the elegant natural science of a hummingbird's wing, and take a walk away from the trappings of civilization, the universe of human myth. Walk in a place relatively untouched by man's heavy hand and just listen. You'll remember your instincts as soon as your head clears. If you were to ask me if, at age 52, I would be willing to give up the rest of my life for the chance to experience five years as a songbird (an average lifespan for such birds -- though crows and geese live 15-20 years and parrots 80 or more), to give up the security and intelligence and property I have accumulated and live free of the demands of human life, spending an hour or four each day finding food, and the rest of the day simply living, just being alive as part of this wonderful, magical world, to be completely free of any demands or restrictions, to be able to fly, I would say: In a heartbeat. |
We have many myths about nature. Most of them are about 'wildness' -- savagery, hardship, suffering. Most of our stories about nature are of the 'Man vs. Nature' variety, about 'survival in the wild', as if that were some extraordinary thing. We build these myths to keep people from running away from our well-meaning but damaged, terrible, unsustainable culture. Richard Manning in Against the Grain has just exploded another of the myths about our culture: He provides a compelling argument that the Great Wall of China, a work of staggering and gruelling human labour visible with a telescope from the moon, was not built, as we were told, to keep the Northern hunter-gatherer cultures (the 'Mongol Hordes') out, but rather to keep the stooped, slave labour in the 'new' civilization culture's peasants in. If you really believe nature is savage, turn off the hysterical nature documentaries and read Bernd Heinrich's Winter World, about how, even in Northern winters, even the tiniest 'wild' animals live joyful, carefree, comfortable lives. And then read David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous to find out how you, too, can reconnect with lovely, peaceful, easy, sustainable nature. The myths we teach our impressionable children about nature, from dragon fables to Old Yeller, are usually about nature's terror and the need to defend and return back 'home' to our 'safe' civilization. There is an astonishing amount of animal cruelty in children's stories, and it is an extremely predatory and desensitizing indoctrination technique. We reinforce these dreadful lies about nature's savagery by sending our children to under-supervised day-care operations called Summer Camps, which, despite their locations and stated objectives, are not at all about nature, but rather deplorable and usually incompetent immersion courses in social skills. At least the British are honest enough to do this without pretext of it being a 'natural' experience: Their social indoctrination is called Boarding School and occurs principally indoors. Whatever its intention, the principal effect of Summer Camp is to untether children from their parents' protection and their need for privacy, and force them to 'get along' with others, find their place in the social pecking order of their 'peers'. For the shy, the weak, the uncoordinated, the physically and emotionally scarred (and that's most children) it can be living hell. For psychopathic children and predatory adults, its lack of supervision provides the ideal environment for honing their manipulation skills on unprotected and vulnerable victims. Whatever this may be, it is certainly no way to introduce a child to nature. Even psychopathic adults use the 'natural experience' cover to prey upon weaker adults. This activity was most famously depicted in the film White Mile, where the aggressive company CEO (played by Alan Alda) bullies younger staff who want to 'get ahead' to go on a 'character-building' white-water rafting trip where they are absolutely at his mercy, and where nature is set up as the straw-man enemy. This psychological brutality is also evident in many cults which use social isolation and deprivation in a pseudo-'natural' setting to break down resistance to the cult leader's propaganda. I recently witnessed a plane-load of teenagers returning from a six-month 'working field trip' billeted in peasants' homes in Paraguay -- these kids were raw with emotion and filled with horror and loathing at the thought of returning 'home' and 'abandoning' the poor Paraguayan families who had opened their homes and hearts to them. Absolute gut-wrenching culture shock. We humans are so easy to socially recondition, so vulnerable to programming and re-programming! Our psyches are so fragile that, especially with the young, we must take great care not to tear them even by the simple act of exposing them to new ideas. This is very dangerous stuff. Damn our adaptability. |
